Beyond Temptation: How to stop overeating

As chronic overeaters these sisters would gorge a whole cake as soon as look
at it. Now they do well to finish a single slice. So what’s their secret?
Not dieting. Olivia Gordon hears how their book, Beyond Temptation, is
transforming the lives of others stuck in a similar place.

It’s 10.30am in Sophie Boss’s living-room, and with the coffee she’s serving a rich, home-made chocolate and pistachio cake.

As she and her sister Audrey, two fortysomething mothers from north London, tuck into their slices there’s no chuckling of ‘Ooh, naughty us’ no trace of guilt and no longing glances at the rest of the cake on the table.

What exactly are they thinking, I ask. ‘It’ll be nice to have a piece of cake, that’s what,’ says Audrey. ‘And I thought, “Yay, she's brought cake,”’ says Sophie. ‘I haven’t had breakfast yet so I’m quite looking forward to this.’

For many women presented with cake, things aren’t quite this simple. Indeed, Audrey explains that back when she struggled with overeating, she would have responded differently.

‘I’d have shut myself in my kitchen and I would have eaten it, all of it, and then just felt awful.’

Audrey has never been particularly overweight, either in her teens when she started dieting, or in her twenties when she was also secretly binge-eating. But, she says, ‘I remember not fitting into a size 16 at M&S and thinking, "This is the end of my life.”’

Sophie, whose dieting history is similar, says, ‘For me, finishing the cake would have been habit. In my mind it was, “I’m being naughty and breaking the rules having something sugary for breakfast. I won’t do this again, therefore I might as well just finish this and start again tomorrow.”’

The sisters first came to attention in 2006 with Beyond Chocolate, a book and series of workshops for women trapped in a yo-yo diet/weight-gain cycle, which brought to Britain the anti-diet revolution pioneered by the author Geneen Roth (who was, in turn, influenced by Susie Orbach, the author of Fat is a Feminist Issue).

Their latest book, Beyond Temptation, recently a stage show, looks specifically at how to stop overeating.

'Beyond Temptation' by Sophie and Audrey Boss

This isn’t about women with diagnosed eating disorders but women – of all sizes – who outwardly pretend to eat normally while secretly overindulging in so-called forbidden foods.

Sophie says that eight out of 10 women, in her experience, have some sort of issue with food. ‘Virtually every woman I’ve ever met blames herself for the fact that she can’t lose weight and stop overeating.

'She tells herself it’s her fault and feels ashamed and guilty.

‘There was a time,’ she adds, ‘when people couldn’t talk about vaginas, couldn’t talk about depression. Talking about our relationship with food and body image feels like a taboo these days.’

Audrey continues, ‘Because there’s so much secrecy, most women imagine that nobody else does it quite like they do. They imagine that other women must eat a doughnut or two more than they should occasionally, but not that most women are pretty tortured about how they eat.

'They look at the next woman who’s slimmer than them and assume she doesn’t have a problem.’

The sisters distance themselves from the endless stream of authors telling us how to reduce calories.

‘Every new diet book is more outrageous than the last, because there’s nothing left to say,’ argues Audrey. ‘We’re not telling people how to eat, just how to have a different relationship with food.’

She explains, ‘If I’m a person who eats cake because I’m bored, I know that it’s not helpful to eat the cake; I’m not stupid, I know it’s not part of my five-a-day. We don’t just say to people, “Well, you’ve got to stop overeating.”’

About half of those who follow the Beyond Temptation programme lose weight, but that is besides the point.

‘It’s actually not about what size you are. It’s about your relationship with your body and with food,’ Audrey says.

‘Sometimes women realise that the way they would have to eat in order to be the size they want is not the way they want to eat. We’re not all made to be a size 12.’

Following the programme is a process that takes months of self-analysis because changes to emotional eating habits don’t happen overnight.

What is refreshing is the acknowledgement that not everyone overeats because of unhappiness, self-loathing or childhood trauma; lots of people do it because food tastes good and they can’t stop.

The book explains that people overeat not just on autopilot but also because they are habituated to listening to unhelpful inner ‘gremlins’, which can take many different forms.

There’s the ‘needy child’ whimpering insistently for food, the ‘critical witch’ who finds fault with everything, the ‘reckless mate’ who says, ‘Go on, let’s have some fun!’ when the eater is considering a binge.

The answer is to ignore the gremlins, allow yourself to eat whatever you want – which may well, if you really listen to your body, be something nourishing and wholesome – and tune into feelings, instead of channelling them into food.

‘As soon as you restrict food, you want it,’ says Audrey. The problem often starts in childhood or adolescence when women first feel pressured to diet, even though they don’t have a significant weight problem.

‘We are told by so many sources so much different stuff about what we should eat, what’s good, what’s bad, what’s appropriate, what’s not.

'Diets get us into the habit of listening to other people, not to ourselves, so most people don’t have a clue what they actually want to eat.’

A key part of the Beyond Temptation technique is ‘stocking up’ – repeatedly buying bulk amounts of your most forbidden food, removing all packaging (to eliminate the idea of portion size) and allowing yourself to eat as much as you want.

Openly sharing an embarrassing penchant for eating too much chocolate – or crisps, or whatever – is another important step in the workshops.

For Jacqui Tabor, 49, a divorcée who is a council worker and has one grown-up daughter, the forbidden food that needed stockpiling was Jaffa Cakes.

For Abbi Welch, a single 36-year-old who works in broadcasting, it was Green & Black’s chocolate. For Caroline McAdam, a single 47-year-old lawyer, it was digestive biscuits.

And for Sarah Layton, a 46-year-old psychotherapist who is married with two grown-up children, it was Marks & Spencer chocolate cheesecake, the kind that comes in packs of two slices.

‘I bought six packs of two and put them in the fridge, ate them when I wanted to and then replenished the supply,’ says Sarah.

From left: Jacqui Tabor, Caroline McAdam, Abbi Welch and Sarah Layton

It sounds like a recipe for overindulgence, but, in fact, this is the Beyond Temptation method for eating mindfully and sensibly.

‘When you tune in and what you want is the cheesecake, you don’t say, “OK, I’m going to eat some meat and veg first.”

'You put it on a plate, sit at the table, light a candle and eat the cheesecake as your main meal.’ Eventually, she explains, the cheesecake loses its allure. ‘Then the last two or three times I bought it, I didn’t eat it. It sat there and went off.’

Before Beyond Temptation, Sarah had ‘given up’. Having been put on a diet aged seven, for being ‘chubby’, she spent much of her teens and early twenties on a strict high-protein, low-carbohydrate regime, which kept her very slim.

Then, when her children came along, ‘life got a bit more complicated and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I started to gain weight again.’

For the next 20 years she was lost in ‘the whole diet-binge cycle… I used to spend my whole time thinking about food. Would, wouldn't, should, shouldn’t, could, couldn’t.’

Now, she says, her weight has stabilised. ‘In an ideal world I’d like to be slimmer, but it’s fine that I’m not.’

Compassion is important, agrees Jacqui. She has yo-yoed between sizes 10 and 18 and says, ‘I’m trying now to see myself with kindness and not look at myself and say, “You fat cow, pull yourself together.”

'I want to be eating because I want to and when I want to, without the constant struggle between being good and bad.’

This works much better for her than her previous approach, as a slimming-club consultant. ‘When I was a consultant I didn’t stand up in front of my ladies and say, “I overate. I had two packets of Jaffa Cakes last week.” I wasn’t being that honest.’

With the help of the slimming club she managed to go from a size 14 to a 10, but she couldn’t maintain it and gained three stone. Now a size 16 to 18, she is more concerned about being happy than what the scales say.

So how has her eating changed? ‘Before, I would go all day without eating, then mindlessly eat a packet of biscuits, and then just have a healthy piece of fish and vegetables.

'Now I’m eating more often and I might do the fish in a nice cream sauce with potatoes dauphinois and sautéed vegetables. I’ll cook and lay the table, really enjoy it.’

Caroline had repeatedly lost and regained four stone, and had tried Overeaters Anonymous, but found she was ‘still left with all these feelings of insecurity about my body’.

Thanks to the stockpiling technique, she is now living peacefully with a large glass jar of digestives in her kitchen. ‘I glance at it from time to time but barely register its presence,’ she says.

Abbi’s weight plateaued and is now gradually falling thanks to the techniques she has learnt. Having been a size 28 at her biggest, she is now a size 24.

‘I was at the end of my tether,’ she recalls. ‘My experience around food was always fraught with complications and agonising over what I can and can’t have.’

It was when, on an internet forum, she saw a woman saying, ‘I know I shouldn’t have carrots because carrots have a lot of sugar in them,’ that she realised dieting was ‘crazy’.

Now she has changed her mindset. ‘I’m thinking about what I need more of as opposed to what I need less of.’

In a funny way, though, too many carrots can still be overeating, according to Sophie and Audrey – not because they contain sugar but precisely because they are the type of low-calorie, filling ‘diet food’ that dieters are encouraged to binge on.

As I leave Sophie’s home, I glance back at the table. Sophie’s plate is now empty; so is Audrey’s. On my plate, half a slice of cake remains, a symbol of guilt. And yet I’m the one who’ll crave chocolate later that day.

Is there a miracle solution to emotional eating? Probably not, but whatever these two women are doing, I want a slice of it.